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Here’s a quick riddle: What’s three and a half inches wide and reaches more than 70 miles into space?
The 1.4 billion credit cards currently in use in the U.S., stacked on top of each other. With more than half a million of these pieces of plastic hitting landfills each year, one thing is for sure: the archeologists of the future will have as plentiful access to plastic as do today’s homo plastic-ens.
Credit cards, debit card, prepaid cards, gift cards, and the like are made from a particularly hardy type of plastic, polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, so durable it is sure to leave a record of modern day Americans’ financial habits in landfills for millennia.
To help reduce the landfill burden resulting from our fondness for plastic, some card issuers are looking into introducing more environmentally friendly credit cards. Discover Card late last year pioneered a Biodegradable Discover More card, made from a PVC, which purportedly will break down 99 percent within five years in landfills, without leaving behind any traces of toxicity.
The new Discover card is made of a new type of PVC that begins to decompose when exposed to the microorganisms present in compost, dirt, landfills, and water. Don’t be concerned about the card breaking down should it get wet, however. According to BIOPVC, the company that invented the PVC used in the biodegradable credit cards, the plastic only begins to break down when the card is left for an extended time in an environment that allows microorganisms to come into constant contact with the bioPVC film.
The secret to the card’s biodegradability is a special ingredient that attracts microorganisms. While one might wish for the new type of plastic to catch on quickly, that special ingredient is likely to remain a trade secret, according to Paul Kappus, Jr., owner and President of BIOPVC.
Discover Card is not the first large company to experiment with biodegradable cards. Retailers like Toy’s R Us and Target have used biodegradable PVC for gift cards; the biodegradable plastic has also been put in use by some hotel chains as room keys.
The biodegradable credit cards are a product of a new technology known as bioremediation, which uses nature’s own processes to address environmental issues and make more sustainable products. Here’s hoping that the PVC-gobbling microorganisms of this world can be persuaded to find another environmentally unfriendly substance equally yummy: oil.
